


My Fair Linguist

by Pares (kormantic)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Linguists, Community: sga_flashfic, Crack, Linguists, M/M, My Fair Lady Mashup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-04
Updated: 2005-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:29:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/Pares
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The guy probably couldn't pick out a full glottal stop in a police lineup, and he was insulting Rodney's <em>pronunciation</em>?</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Fair Linguist

**Author's Note:**

> 100% pure _crack_ for the sga_flashfic Harlequin challenge.

Shielding his head with his laptop case, Professor Rodney McKay stepped out from under the hotel awning and made a dash for the street.

"Taxi! Taxi! Zelenka, how do you say 'taxi' in Czech anyway?"

"'Taxi'," Zelenka answered, finally, looking amused. Zelenka rarely looked anything other than amused, and as he was also twinkly and cuddly-looking and absurdly accented, pretty young grad students thronged him at every conference. Playboy, Rodney sneered privately.

"Yes, yes, very funny. Colonel Zelenka, everybody, he'll be here all week." Rodney flailed his arms at another passing yellow cab, jumping back before earning a face full of road splash. "Apparently, I meant that literally. Why is it you can never get a cab when it's raining? We'll never make it back for Fauconnier's seminar."

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a sort of minivan pulled up in front of them. Blue lettering proclaimed it a member of the Puddle Jumper Van Pool.

"This should do nicely, actually. Well, all in." Rodney opened the door and saw a tall man with a thick shock of dark hair behind the wheel. "Uh, thanks for stopping."

The man looked faintly surprised.

"I didn't, mister. I'm here to take those kids to their karate class." He nodded past Rodney, who turned around to see a flock of uniformed ten-year-olds goggling at him.

"Oh. My mistake."

"It could happen to anybody," the driver said easily. Still, rain was beginning to soak the collar of his tweed jacket, and Rodney didn't like his chances of getting a cab, and if he wasn't there to call Gilles on his ridiculous theories of metonymies and image schemas, who would?

"But I wonder… could you take us anyway? I'll pay you a hundred bucks." He rifled through his pockets, flipping through pink notes, and came up with a roll of bills. "American," he promised.

The guy just stared at him, and eventually Zelenka took Rodney's arm and said, "Professor McKay, even you, who is said to have made every teaching assistant ever assigned to you cry, would not steal a bus from schoolchildren? In the _rain_?"

"What? Of course not." He appealed to the driver, holding out a now soggy hundred dollar bill. "I meant, you know, in addition to the kids. After you've seen that they've all toddled safely off to class to learn new and exciting ways to cause each other irreparable bodily harm."

The driver grinned at him.

"I guess I could. But let the kids in first, wouldja? And Aidan," the driver addressed a taller kid, maybe fifteen, his arms folded across his chest. "Keep an eye on these two, huh?"

Rodney passed a rather harrowing quarter of an hour, during which Zelenka told stories to the raptly attentive children on his side of the bus about Old Bodrik and the Wolf, young Aidan made him the focus of a truly impressive stink-eye and some brute in pigtails kicked the back of Rodney's chair every time they ran a yellow light, which was fairly often. Eventually, however, the kids clambered out of the van, and Rodney was able to direct the driver to 655 West 34th Street.

"So, you guys are going to the convention center, huh?"

"Yes. The Sixth Annual National Cognitive Linguistics Conference, in fact."

"We are presenting joint paper on standardizing an international sign language," Zelenka offered. "Very revolutionary."

"But that's small potatoes next my research in cognitive neuroscience," Rodney said smugly.

"So you're a medical doctor?" The driver met Rodney's eyes briefly in the van's mirror.

"Technically," said Rodney, waving a dismissive hand, "But I've also got Ph.Ds in linguistics and electrical engineering. Sort of a scientific jack of all trades, if you will."

"So that would make you master of none?" The driver drawled.

"I'll have you know that I've presented papers on teaching AIs to _think_ , in fact I've--" Wait, wait, security clearance, crap. "--well, never mind that. Anyway, could you maybe, I don't know, keep your eyes on the road? Americans."

Zelenka, as usual, only looked amused.

"You're not American?" The driver looked surprised again, from what Rodney could see in the rearview mirror.

"Of course not," Rodney snapped. "I'm Canadian."

"So you're from the country of hockey and maple syrup, eh?"

"Oh, thank you for that mindless oversimplification of a country with a rich traditional history."

"Of hockey and maple syrup," said the driver, whose name, according to the hack license and the name stenciled neatly below it, was John Sheppard.

"I've never been so insulted in all my life," lied Rodney. This didn't hold a candle to the time Grodin had called his ancestry into question over iconicism in Edinburgh in '99.

He saw Sheppard smirk in the mirror and mouth an exaggerated 'been'. The guy probably couldn't pick out a full glottal stop in a police lineup, and he was insulting Rodney's _pronunciation_?

"I'll have you know that Canadians invented basketball, the Hydrofoil, the _pacemaker_ and instant mashed potato flakes."

" _Potato_ flakes?" Both Sheppard and Zelenka, who wore matching masks of incredulity, uttered this in stereo.

"Yes. Dehydrated potato flakes, Edward A. Asselbergs, 1962." Prompted by Zelenka's raised eyebrow he continued, "What? They're delicious, and they last forever."

As Zelenka shook his head, Sheppard chimed in, "So what, exactly, is traditional about pacemakers and potato flakes?"

"You know what? I'm not here to give lessons in cultural diversity. Are we there yet?"

"As a matter of fact, we are." Sheppard pulled into the center's drive, and let them out.

Grimly, Rodney held out the crumpled bill, but Sheppard waved it away.

"Just tell me something, Professor McKay," and Rodney paused, a bit confused. "Why sign language?"

"My sister Jeanne," he said without thinking. "She was born deaf."

He stared as Sheppard made a few nimble signs and then grinned at him before standing up and reaching back to slide the van door closed.

"Take care, you two."

And then he drove away.

"Professor McKay? Rodney?" Distantly, he heard Zelenka calling him, and he shook his head to clear it. "What, he said something? More with the insults to your homeland?"

"No, nothing like that. It's just-- he apparently knows sign language. He said 'Bell, 1908'."

"I am not familiar with reference."

"Alexander Graham Bell. He was an American, you know, the phone guy? He worked on the Hydrofoil with Casey Baldwin. Huh."

"Not just another pretty face, then," Zelenka murmured, and it took a fair amount of Rodney's reserve not to kick him in the shins.

"Save what passes for your 'wit' for the next round of leggy TA's, why don't you?"

And together they walked into the conference center.

*

Okay, then, Rodney runs into John somewhere touristy while he and Zelenka check out the city, and they find out that John has lost his job because, "It seems that the parents weren't too crazy about me picking up two strange men while in the middle of delivering their kids," and Rodney feels slightly guilty about this, and makes a bet with Zelenka that there's a paper in studying the cognitive neurology of teaching an American to speak like a Canadian, and awkwardly offers to pay John ridiculous amounts of money to be a test subject, and by the way John has also been squeezed out of his tiny many-roommated apartment, and then they all go back to Rodney's CAL lab and live in Rodney's handsome two-story Tudor house, and there are a whole bunch of scenes where Rodney tries to get John to say "aboot" while cramming his mouth with square after square of Dairy Milk, and Zelenka is sneaking him the _good_ Canadian beer on the sly, which Rodney has been withholding because of John's mulish insistence on being pro-American, and then there's a whole montage where they sing about how John wants to rip Rodney's head off and stuff him down a laundry chute, but then he accidentally says "Cut me some slack, Rodney, I think I'm making some real _pro_ gress, here" and then they do that linking arms and swinging around bit in celebration, and they present the paper and Rodney is outrageously rude and smug and also drunk and there is some making out that Rodney doesn't remember the next morning, and Zelenka giving Rodney exasperated looks, and then John, who is of course tremendously useful at everything and becomes somehow integral to Rodney's every day life, then gets a linguistics fellowship to a big ten school, because he was really a grad student in cognitive neuroscience himself!, and seeing as how Rodney doesn't _appreciate_ him, he leaves, and Rodney freaks out after John's gone and wonders how he'll _ever go on without him_ and then John shows up, saying he was able to swing a fat grant and a paid internship at CAL because of his mad linguistic skillz and his ability to work with Rodney and get ever-more-brilliant work out of him, and Rodney hunches down in his easychair and demands his slippers, and John then pegs him in the head with them, right before he drags Rodney out of the chair for a bone-melting kiss followed immediately by a desperately sexy and grateful blowjob provided by Rodney.

The End


End file.
